What do I do in a wuxia game?
Everybody was kung fu fighting…yes, true but there’s more!
If you are familiar with fantasy or other action adventure based games you’ll find much the same things to occupy your heroes such as in-your-face-villains, scheming bureaucrats, ancient sleeping evils, dungeons and more.
And wuxia as a genre supports groups of heroes working together. And everyone will be kung fu fighting! Every beginning character starts with two skills at level 1 so they can always add kung fu to their character concept. They don’t have too. They can, and probably should because this is wuxia after all. Though I have seen very successful characters shun the martial arts for their own style of approaching action.
The GM gets plenty of help too with expanded adventure and dungeon generation tables complete with genre tropes, plots and more. Everyone is scheming. Just get a few NPCs in the story and you’ll have plenty of trouble, er…content to give your players.
I mentioned villains. We have lots of villains and they are perfectly made for escalating power levels, from lowly mooks, major NPCs and Master Villains all waiting to face off with your group. We’ve also made it easy to create the villains and give them some flavor so they’ll stand out while not wearing out your GM spending hours on stat blocks. We save the complex character development for the player characters. After all, they’ll be the stars of your stories and who wants to spend that much time on statistics for villains that are created just to be destroyed by the dozens, hundreds, or more? Probably not all at once, but still…they are easy to create and fun to run in combats.
But wait, there’s more! Besides adventure and dungeon generators, we’ve also provided several campaign starter seeds complete with ideas of how to use them over an entire story arc. We have several different styles of campaign starters. Choose one that best fits what your group wants to play, or mix ideas from two or more campaign starters. We just provide the initial push the rest will come about through play.
I mentioned dungeons earlier. Dungeons? In a wuxia game? What is this? There are plenty of dungeons in martial arts TV series and movies. Treasure Venture, House of Traps, Lord Bat, Judge Dee (the both new and old), Forbidden Kingdom. Seriously, you can’t watch wuxia movies and TV series without seeing dungeons in them. But don’t take my word for it. Take it from a wuxia expert (even though he would say he isn’t, he really is) and wuxia RPG game designer Brendan Davis: Video Dungeons in Wuxia Campaigns.
Still strapped for ideas? Here is Hint #1. Watch wuxia movies and TV series. The movies will teach you how to cook up really great villains, weapons and plots for your game. The TV series will show you how to make your adventures work with groups of characters. Players, you can find really good examples of character arcs in the TV series.
GMs – watch Lord Bat, Web of Death and House of traps for some wicked dungeon ideas.
Players – watch Strange Hero Yi Zhi Mei and The Four, (both TV series) for terrific character examples and how to work as a group yet still maintain distinctive individual heroes.
Still need more? Here is Hint #2. Westerns. Yep. Watch Wild West movies and TV shows and you then reskin them for wuxia. The sheriff becomes a magistrate. The saloon becomes a tea house, swap six-guns for kung fu, a gunfight at high noon becomes a duel to the death in a fancy courtyard. Easy!
